The image above is from Moroleon, Guanajuato a city in Mexico where I grew up. The three cones of yarn appear to serve as a kind of monument to the textile industry that modernized this once small village into a powerful producer of textiles. Moroleon is now unequivocally associated with textile industrial production.  In other contexts, yarn still has strong cultural and gendered associations with traditional craft and weaving production, which have been affected by encroaching capitalist markets.

Yarn and other fibrous material have been a part of Mexico’s history for thousands of years in indigenous communities (archaeologists have found pieces of cotton and cloth that proved to be at least 7,000 years old). Its importance to the huichol indigenous communities is still evident in their peyote-inspired yarn painting, which embody their spiritual cosmology.

I am interested in working with yarn as a modeling material and medium through which to explore its associations and uses in Mexican culture, and make visible its significance at the intersection of cultural, political, and economic networks. Furthermore, I hope to engage notions of identity and authenticity within the context of capitalist and industrial production. I propose to create a model that will allow visitors to engage with the material and produce a dialogical space wherein multiple contexts are addressed and negotiated. In relation to the exhibition space, I am interested to see what correspondences, resonances, or tensions are produced and provide an array of conceptions and roles of modeling and modeling practices.